


night terrors

by rangerhitomi



Category: Cardfight!! Vanguard
Genre: Bonding With Mom, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Nightmares, Sharing a Bed, Sleepovers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-17
Updated: 2018-08-17
Packaged: 2019-06-28 15:02:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,472
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15709614
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rangerhitomi/pseuds/rangerhitomi
Summary: A sleepover, Kai thinks, is for sleeping. But for him, sleep doesn't come, and for Aichi, sleep becomes too real.---Kai comforts Aichi after a terrifying nightmare.





	night terrors

Moonlight filters into the room through the open window, bathing the sleeping figure of Sendou Aichi in its cool glow. On the floor of the room, casually stretched across a mat, Kai Toshiki is having trouble falling asleep.

He still doesn’t quite know how he'd ended up staying over. Even as a young child he never slept over at a friend's house. But Aichi's mother had talked him into it--sternly--and even prepared late-night snacks for the two of them should they stay up late doing whatever it was she thought teenage boys did at sleepovers. Kai certainly didn't know. She even procured an unused toothbrush from somewhere and had Aichi dig around for some too-big clothes that Kai could wear to sleep in (which ended up being too small regardless, but it was better than sleeping in his school clothes).

They had played Vanguard, of course, several matches of it. They made small talk about Kai's plans for graduation. They started a movie but got bored twenty minutes in and decided to go to sleep. It made sense. As far as Kai was concerned, sleepovers were for sleep.

When offered the sofa in the living room or a pallet on the floor of Aichi's bedroom, Kai opted for the pallet. The living room is eerily quiet; Aichi's room, with the soft natural light and Aichi's quiet breathing, is inviting.

Kai's apartment is dark and cramped, with a bed just big enough to fit him and enough kitchen counter space to use a cutting board; it’s the best he could afford living solely on what he'd inherited from his parents. It’s a place to sleep and eat, good for little else than as a place to store his paltry belongings.

Aichi's room, by contrast, is light and airy, with a soft bed and warm blankets; a neatly organized desk by the window is lovingly used, with pictures of him surrounded by smiling friends in frames or tacked onto a corkboard. It’s a place to sleep, but also a place to relax, to think, to deck build, and to work on the demanding schoolwork at which Aichi excelled. There is more than Aichi's presence in this room. There is the presence of being home.

Despite the atmospheric comfort, Kai is wide awake, with the glowing numbers on his phone telling him it was two in the morning. There isn’t any school tomorrow, of course, but he still wants to sleep.

At about two-thirty, the atmosphere changes.

Aichi's soft breathing changes to quiet hums, a small sound from the nasal passage. It sounds vaguely content for the first ten minutes, and Kai lies awake with his eyes closed, listening to the sound with fifteen second intervals. But then it becomes more frequent, longer, with less of a soft humming sound and more of a weak groan each time.

Kai opens his eyes.

The noises become louder, punctuated by shivers and violently twitching legs.

“Aichi?” he says cautiously. Quietly. 

The noises stop, and for a moment Kai thinks Aichi is awake. 

“Aichi?” Louder, this time.

No response. 

Kai pulls his blanket off and climbs to his knees. With the moonlight and streetlamps shining into the room, he can make out Aichi’s face clearly; the muscles in his cheeks and jaw spasm as his legs kick out, tangling in his blankets, or perhaps trying to break free of them. 

Aichi is clearly having a nightmare, and a powerful one. How common are they? Every night? How long had they been happening? Since his childhood, when his classmates bullied him? Since Psyqualia? 

Since Link Joker?

_ Should I wake him? _

The soft, sobbing whimpers return and Kai makes up his mind. 

His footsteps are silent as he approaches Aichi’s bed. But as he stands over Aichi’s trembling body, he doesn’t know what to do next. If he touches him, it might make things worse. But Aichi doesn’t respond to Kai whispering his name, doesn’t respond to the slight sinking of the bed as Kai tentatively sits on the edge of it. 

He reaches out a hand, slowly. 

Aichi’s reaction to Kai’s hand on his shoulder is immediate; his eyes snap open and he jerks away. But as his eyes move from the hand touching him to Kai’s face, his expression morphs from startled to terrified, and he opens his mouth to scream.

Kai reflexively places his hand over Aichi’s mouth, heart pounding, but certainly not as fast or painfully as Aichi’s. He curses himself for deciding that waking him would  _ help, _ as if he wouldn’t be the next character in Aichi’s continuing nightmare. 

“I’m sorry,” he whispers, and Aichi’s only response is his continued heavy breathing, condensing in hot waves over Kai’s cold hand. “Please… please don’t scream, okay?”

He pulls his hand away. Aichi doesn’t scream, but his breathing is loud and labored, his chest rising and falling so rapidly that Kai fears he is about to hyperventilate. 

“You’re awake.”

Aichi’s eyes dart from Kai’s face to the bedroom door, to his desk, to the window through which the full moon sent its light. His face crumples, and he tears his gaze away from the moon and rolls over onto his bed in a ball, pulling his body in on itself as tightly as he can, hands covering his face. 

Touching Aichi had elicited this reaction in the first place, so Kai remains still and silent so as not to worsen it; his chest physically hurts from the emotional toll that watching Aichi react so viscerally to a nightmare is taking on him. 

Still, his emotional pain at the moment is nothing, it seemed, compared to Aichi’s. 

Aichi remains curled up between his bed and the wall, facing away from Kai. The tension in his trembling body begins to relax; his breathing slows. 

Kai decides to try again. 

“Aichi.”

Slowly, Aichi rolls onto his back, body straightening out, and he manages to lift himself high enough on his elbows to collapse onto his pillow. 

“You?” Aichi’s voice is almost imperceptible. 

“It’s me.”

“Kai?”

“Yeah.”

“Not…” Aichi lifts a still-shaking hand, clearly reaching up toward Kai’s face. 

So Kai bends down, just enough for Aichi’s fingertips to brush the skin under Kai’s eyes. 

“No,” he says, voice breaking at the touch, because now he knows that the cause of Aichi’s nightmare is him. “Just me.”

Aichi swallows and struggles to sit up. Kai holds out a hand for support but Aichi looks away. 

“Oh,” he says in a shaky voice, staring at his blanket,  _ "oh." _

“I didn’t,” Kai begins, and curses his still-weak voice, “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

Aichi takes a series of slow breaths, still avoiding Kai’s gaze. 

Then he begins to cry.

His tears are silent, but they spill from him as though he had been holding them back for years; the dam has finally broken against the weight and now nothing can hold them back. His body trembles as he slumps over his knees and places his hands over his face, whether as a futile attempt to stem the tide or to hide them, Kai doesn’t know. 

Kai can think of nothing to make the situation better; his very presence is a trigger for Aichi’s panic attacks, for his nightmares, for his trauma. Tears burn in the corners of his own eyes, but what right does he have to cry?

A wholly inadequate “I’m sorry” slips from his lips, and Aichi pulls his wet, salty hands away from his face, at last looking Kai in the eyes. 

The light filtering through the window catches the tears clinging to Aichi’s eyelashes. The urge to reach out a hand and wipe them away overwhelms Kai. 

_ You can’t. _

He places his hand on the bed between them instead, clenching the sheets just to have something to do with it. 

Aichi moves closer.

“Kai…”

Kai’s hand tightens on the sheets. 

Aichi’s hand wraps around Kai’s, wet and clammy and gentle. 

Kai swallows.

“Aichi--”

The hand on Kai’s moves, finding the folds on Kai’s borrowed shirt, and before he knew what was happening, Aichi had curled himself into Kai’s body, head resting on Kai’s chest as he cries, hands clenching fistfuls of Kai’s pajamas as Aichi searches out a comfortable position.

Kai lets him, heart pounding. He knows Aichi can hear the intensifying  _ th-thumps;  _ the burning tears flee their prison and a few drops trickle into Aichi’s hair. 

_ Now. _

Aichi’s whimpers soften the deeper he pulls himself into Kai.

_ Now you can. _

Kai’s arm moves, certainly on its own, because if he’d willed it to wrap around Aichi’s slender frame, he would have frozen. If he had commanded his other hand to hold Aichi’s head close to his chest, to wrap his fingers through Aichi’s soft-yet-sweaty hair, it would have tried to push Aichi away instead. 

But he holds Aichi until the trembling subsides, until the hiccups cease, until the stuttered breaths become soft and even, until Aichi’s entire body relaxes heavily in Kai’s arms.

He doesn’t know what time it is ; it can’t be later than four, as the sun isn’t ready to rise yet. But with Aichi’s nightmares ceased, Kai can lay him down, tuck him in, and return to his own pallet to rest for a couple hours longer. 

“Don’t leave,” Aichi whispers, and Kai’s heart sinks because Aichi wasn’t asleep after all. 

_ I’ll be just a few feet away, _ Kai wanted to say. “I won’t,” he says instead. 

He places Aichi down on his pillow.

Aichi gazes up at him, blinking the last droplets from his eyes as though in slow-motion. His hand clenches Kai’s shirt, even now; maybe he is terrified that Kai  _ would  _ leave again.

Kai has no intention of hurting Aichi again.

When the sun rose, they might feel the embarrassment of waking in the same bed, seeing the other’s bedhead and shadowed, tired eyes. They might pull apart with stammered excuses and apologies, convincing themselves that in the heat of the moment they had needed the company of another. They might avoid looking at each other for a week.

But for now, Kai doesn’t hesitate.

He settles down next to Aichi, placing his head on the same pillow so their hair tangles together and he can hear the sharp intake of breath as Aichi turns his head and finds their faces centimeters apart. 

“Kai.” 

“Aichi.”

Aichi closes his mouth, breathing through his nose instead, a soft whistle. He’s congested from crying so much. “Kai, I--”

“Shh.” 

Kai doesn’t want Aichi to say anything. He had long since accepted his own feelings for Aichi. For how grateful he was to have him in his life. For how sorry he was, for how irredeemable his actions had once been. For how much he prayed that they could grow closer even if Kai’s dreams for the future took him far away. 

He thinks, or maybe hopes with all his soul, that Aichi feels the same. But here, lying so close to Aichi that if one of them shifted they’d be face-to-face, lying here after Aichi had drained his sinuses of snot and tears that now drenched Kai’s shirt, lying here with their hands on one another’s waists, it still doesn’t seem right to close that gap, because Aichi is hurting and Kai could never take advantage of Aichi’s need for companionship. 

If it is to happen at all, he wants there to be a smile on Aichi’s face.

He listens to Aichi’s soft sniffles as he drifts off to sleep. He watches Aichi’s face melt into contentment. He feels Aichi’s hand slack on Kai’s waist even as he moves into Kai’s chest.

Finally, Kai falls asleep to Aichi’s heart drumming out a slow beat against Kai’s own. 

* * *

 

The sun had risen when Kai’s eyes open. The brightness confuses him for a moment before he feels the weight of Aichi’s body against his and his heart skips a beat. 

Then it halts to a stop as the door opens.

“Kai? Aichi? Would you like me to make--”

Aichi doesn’t stir but Kai, lying on his back with Aichi using his chest as a pillow, can see Aichi’s mother standing at the doorway, a fully bewildered look on her face as she stares at her son and the only friend her son had ever brought home cuddling in the small bed.

_ I can never return here, _ Kai thinks. 

Seeing that Kai is awake, and apparently recovering from the surprise of the sight in front of her, she whispers, “I’m going to make some breakfast if you want it,” and closes the door gently. 

It takes ten seconds before Kai remembers to breathe. 

Five minutes pass before Kai is able to pull himself out from under Aichi without waking him. But now that he is sitting up and contemplating leaving Aichi to go eat breakfast, the fear that Aichi would wake and find himself alone despite Kai’s promise to stay with him overtakes him. 

_ I could wake him and we could go down together, _ he thinks, and it seems the polite thing to do when staying at someone’s house not to ditch the host to go eat with the host’s mother, but at the same time, Aichi looks more content than Kai could have imagined. Surely he needs the sleep. 

So Kai takes a pen and a sticky note from Aichi’s desk and scrawls a note, leaving on the pillow next to Aichi’s face.

_ Come downstairs for breakfast when you wake. -Kai _

The smell of strong coffee greets him upon entering the kitchen. Aichi’s mother stands over the stove, lightly toasting pieces of bread, and turns to greet him when she hears his footsteps. 

“Good morning, Kai. Did you sleep well?” 

She turns pink before the words are out of her mouth, but it is too late to take them back, and Kai feels his face warm, too. 

“Fine,” he manages, turning to the table, where small bowls of assorted fruit were already cut and laid out for two. 

He’d forgotten that Emi had spent the night at her own friend’s house. He isn’t sure if it was a good or bad thing she wasn’t there to pick up on his embarrassment. 

“I just brewed some coffee if you want, there’s milk on the counter.”

“Thank you.”

Kai pours a mug and adds a small splash of milk, just enough to take the edge off the bitter drink. The thought occurs to him that he should offer to help with breakfast, but she already had most of it ready, and she would certainly tell him that guests don’t help do chores in her home. He feels awkward sitting by himself at the table and wonders if he should have stayed in bed until Aichi woke, but now that he was here, he might as well address it.

“Um, Mrs. Sendou, has Aichi…” 

Two questions fight to be asked. One is selfish, the other about Aichi. For once, Kai’s selfishness loses out.

“Has Aichi what, dear?”

“Has he… had night terrors before?”

She pauses in flipping a piece of toast in the pan. Her shoulders slump. “He… has.”

“How long?”

The half-toasted bread goes onto the plate and she hastily drops another piece onto the skillet. “Since he was very young.” She pokes at the bread with her tongs. “The other children in his class, they didn’t treat him kindly.”

An understatement. Kai still remembered the first time he’d met Aichi, how Aichi had been beat up. And again the next time they were to meet, the day both of their lives changed. 

“He had them again,” Kai says quietly, sipping at the coffee. “The nightmares.”

He can’t see her face, but he imagines she didn’t take this news lightly. “I see.”

“I made it worse on accident. It took a long time to calm him down.”

“You touched him?”

“Yes.”

Her sigh is audible. This piece of bread burns on one side. 

“His trauma was physical. He probably thought you were part of the nightmare.”

“I realize that now.”

“How did you calm him?” 

Her voice is higher now. She knows; Kai doesn’t want to voice it.

“I… talked him down when I realized that touching him made it worse. Told him I was there. Told him I wouldn’t leave him.”

Her shoulders move. He hears a quiet sniffle. 

“Thank you.” She picks up the plate of unevenly toasted bread and brings it to the table, setting a few pieces onto his plate and then onto the plate across from him. “Thank you for loving my son.”

With a deep breath, she turns her back on him and bustles back into the kitchen to clean up, clinking plates and cutlery together loudly as she washes the dirty dishes. 

Kai spent enough time in the kitchen to know that cleanup best happened after eating. But he can’t say anything. His mouth is a desert, and chewing toast is almost impossible. He can’t swallow the coffee through the lump in his throat. 

Aichi shuffles into the kitchen just as Kai is debating getting up to help her clean, rubbing his eyes sleepily. 

“Good morning.” He smiles at Kai, a shy, small smile. There is some color in his cheeks, as there must have also been in Kai’s as he recalls the feeling of holding Aichi as they slept. 

“Good morning.”

“Good morning, sweetie, I made some food for you!” Aichi’s mother doesn’t turn around as she cleans the same spot of kitchen counter for the sixth time. 

“Thanks, Mom.”

Aichi sits across from Kai and helps himself to some fruit. They eat in silence, Aichi occasionally glancing up and blushing when Kai catches him staring before hurriedly shoving food in his mouth and staring intently at his plate. 

Part of Kai had wondered whether Aichi would think that what happened the night before was all part of the dream, or if Aichi knew it was real.

_ Thank you for loving my son. _

Does Aichi know? Does he know how Kai felt? Does he talk about Kai to his mother and sister? 

Kai finishes his breakfast first but waits for Aichi to excuse himself before following suit. Aichi thanks his mother again, Kai echoes him, and they head back upstairs to Aichi’s room. 

Aichi sits on the edge of his unmade bed; Kai stands next to the largely unused pallet in the middle of the floor, the too-small pajama pants hovering mid-calf on his legs. 

He's getting tired of the awkward silences. 

“Um, Kai, I wanted to- to talk to you about something.”

Kai swallows and nods. 

“Um…” Aichi clears his throat. He brushes his hair out of his face and looks at his desk. “Want to… want to sit down?”

Aichi shifts over on the bed with clear intent. Kai sits, the pants rising almost to his knees. 

“What is it?”

With a deep breath, Aichi blurts out, “I’m sorry for last night.”

If there was anyone to be sorry, it was Kai. “What for?”

“I was really needy.” Aichi scratches the back of his hand. “It probably made you uncom--”

“I wasn’t,” Kai interrupts curtly. 

“You’re not… very…” Aichi flounders for a word, hands flapping. 

“Personable? Touchable? Affectionate?”

Aichi turns crimson. “I don’t mean it like that.” He sighs, defeated. “I guess I didn’t expect you to stay.”

“You asked me to. Why wouldn’t I?”

Instead of answering, Aichi holds his hand inside his other, frowning. “I wish… I could have dreams with you in them that weren’t nightmares.”

Kai’s throat tightens.

“We were on the rooftop. You know. But… I lost.” Aichi looks up at the ceiling. “Link Joker was already defeated, so I thought, I may have lost but at least Kai is free. And you told me from the start of the fight, you were going to fight… and disappear from my life.”

That’s right; Kai remembers those words. He bitterly regrets them, almost more than any others.

“You walked to the edge of the building and looked up and the rings in the sky were collapsing and I tried to grab your hand and pull you back, but you pushed me away and--”

He cuts off with a small gasp as Kai grabs his hand and pulls him close. 

“You bring me back,” Kai whispers into Aichi’s hair. “Imagine it. That’s how the nightmare ends.”

Aichi’s hand finds its way around Kai’s waist, and he pulls himself close again. This time, though, he isn’t shaking, crying. 

“I don’t have to imagine it, Kai,” he whispers back, and Kai’s heart isn’t pounding anymore, but fluttering, like a butterfly trapped in his chest, trying to escape. He wants Aichi to feel it, and maybe Aichi does, because when he looks up, there is nothing but admiration and love in his eyes. “You’re right here.”

 


End file.
